Posted By The New York Times
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SHANKSVILLE, Pa. — When the plane crashed in the empty field north of town, the schools let out early. Katlin Rodriguez, 11 at the time, waited in a cafeteria full of crying and shocked classmates for her mother and stepfather to come and take her home. When they showed up, they had brought along a family friend. “Don’t worry,” said the friend, a teenager who announced he had just enlisted. “We’re going to get them. We’re going to get the ones who did this.”
On a muggy Friday morning 20 years later, Ms. Rodriguez, now the wife of a Marine and the mother of a 6-year-old girl, was planting American flags in a small field not far from where Flight 93 went down outside Shanksville, Pa. About a dozen people were with her, each flag they planted representing one of 7,049 U.S. service members who had died in the wars that were waged since that late summer morning in 2001.
“A lot of the kids I went to school with, they enlisted,” Ms. Rodriguez said, looking out across the field. “It made a lot of us feel more connected to the larger world.”…
